We come now to the third and final book in our series on
“Three Key Books on Common Sense.” Paradoxically
(but consistent with the thought of Chesterton, Knox, and Sheen), Fulton J.
Sheen’s God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
was the first written (in 1925), but would make little sense to the reader
unless it is read last. This is because,
unlike many books, God and Intelligence
is easier to understand by reading it in light of what came after publication,
rather than before.
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| Jacket description of God and Intelligence. |
That being the
case, we believe that if someone reads God and Intelligence before reading St. Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” and Enthusiasm, he or she risks throwing aside the book as a piece of
obscure academic theorizing with no relevance to real life. Reading it after the two subsequent books,
however, Sheen’s analysis of what he considered one of the most serious
problems in the world today becomes clear as the reader meets concepts with
which he or she is already familiar.
Thus, it is appropriate that the work of Fulton Sheen that
was the starting point for our “Common Sense Trio” should be the end of our
short journey here, albeit the beginning of a very long journey for the
intellectually honest reader. (By the
way, it is purely coincidence that this posting is published on December 9, the
anniversary of Sheen’s death — it just worked out that way.)
So, where Chesterton’s The
“Dumb Ox” is a popular account of the error behind the errors, Sheen’s God and Intelligence is an in-depth
analysis of the material Chesterton popularized. Knox’s Enthusiasm,
as we have seen, is about how that fundamental error was applied in many
different ways, but with certain characteristics that are always there.
And the error? The “twist
to the mind” with which all three of our authors were concerned? That is the abandonment of the Intellect in
favor of the Will, and the consequent development not merely of a new religion,
but of a new concept of religion. As
Sheen put it, it boils down to putting God at the service of man, rather than vice versa — “my will, not Thine.”
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| Bare knuckles defense of truth |
Sheen’s book is thus somewhat redundant when read last, but
still key. Chesterton’s book is a very
easy, even conversational introduction to a difficult subject. It omits a great deal of the logical proof
and empirical evidence. Sheen’s book,
however, is (in scholarly terms) an in-depth, down and dirty, bare knuckles
treatment, from which Sheen’s later skill at communicating difficult thought in
a popular manner is largely absent.
This is understandable, as the book was written to qualify
for an academic degree, not for public consumption — the “first edition”
printing consisted of a mere six copies!
Grasping it therefore requires much more work on the reader’s part as
well as a great deal of preparation — fortunately provided by Chesterton’s and
Knox’s books . . . assuming we read them first.
If we do that, it becomes evident that there must have been
serious discussion among the three men about the abandonment of reason in the
modern world. Specifically, they would
have discussed the rejection of the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas and how
this led directly to the development of an entirely new concept of religion,
especially within the Catholic Church.
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| New Age: Man becomes God. |
The abandonment of reason was, therefore, something of
supreme concern to Chesterton, Knox, and Sheen.
All three evidently realized that, paralleling developments in civil
society, once moral relativism is inserted into religion by dismissing an
understanding of the natural law based on God’s Nature self-realized in His
Intellect and discernible by the force and light of human reason alone, what
results is (as Fulton Sheen put it in his continuation of God and Intelligence), “Religion Without God.” Man, not God, becomes the center.
We need to divert for a moment from the thread of our
argument. This is because mentioning Religion Without God (1928) brings in a practical
difficulty. Sheen regarded the book as a
continuation of God and Intelligence,
and (much like Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics and The Politics are two
parts of a larger work) it probably should be read in conjunction with the
earlier book. It expands on the theme —
the abandonment of reason — and how this led to the invention of new concepts
of God and religion. It’s also much
better written and clearly directed at a popular, rather than an academic
audience.
It
may not be a coincidence that Sheen began broadcasting in 1928, and this, plus
teaching at the Catholic University of America, had honed his communication
skills.
The problem is that Religion
Without God is a very rare book — the least expensive one of two copies we located
recently was $99.99 (and it was on sale).
We only have a copy through the good offices of Guy “the Fulton Sheen
Guy” Stevenson, who has made an avocation of the study of Sheen’s thought and
its application to the Just Third Way of the Center for Economic and Social
Justice,
especially the Capital Homesteading
proposal.
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| Clever, but completely irrational. |
Fortunately, Chesterton and Knox cover the same material as did
Sheen in Religion Without God in The “Dumb Ox” and Enthusiasm, respectively. This
is not surprising, since Sheen consulted both Chesterton and Knox in writing God and Intelligence, and Sheen viewed Religion Without God as the second part of God and Intelligence.
For our purposes, then, we can use quotes and cites from Religion Without God to amplify points
we’ve already covered in this series under Chesterton and Knox. It would, therefore, be good if a copy of Religion Without God can be located, but
it’s not strictly speaking essential in order to understand and appreciate
Sheen’s contribution to identifying the problem of the abandonment of common
sense — and where it began.
So, to begin (and to resume our argument), we’ve already
seen how Chesterton, Knox, and Adler — and probably a number of others — all
commented on how “stale” Aristotelian philosophy (and thus that of Aquinas) had
become by the sixteenth century. To be
perfectly accurate, of course, it wasn’t the thought of Aristotle or Aquinas
that became stale, but that of Academia, as it has in our day. As Adler commented from the perspective of
the late twentieth century,
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| Mortimer J. Adler |
“In the eyes of my
contemporaries the label ‘Aristotelian’ [and ‘that of his great disciple Thomas Aquinas’
Adler added previously — ed.] has
dyslogistic connotations. It has had
such connotations since the beginning of modern times. To call a man an Aristotelian carries with it
highly derogatory implications. It
suggests that his is a closed mind, in such slavish subjection to the thought
of one philosopher as to be impervious to the insights or arguments of others.
. . . Foolish Aristotelians there must have been among the decadent scholastics
who taught philosophy in the universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. They probably account for the
vehemence of the reaction against Aristotle, as well as the flagrant
misapprehension or ignorance of his thought.”
(Adler, Ten Philosophical
Mistakes, op. cit., 195-196.)
As Chesterton remarked, “By the end of the Medieval time,
Aristotelianism did eventually grow stale.
Only a very fresh and successful novelty ever gets quite so stale as
that.” (Chesterton, The “Dumb Ox”, op.
cit., 77.)
Recent events in Academia present a graphic illustration of
the results of abandoning reason by rejecting Aristotelian-Thomism. In a piece in 2015 following the student
unrest over trivialities at the University of Missouri, Daniel Henninger of the
Wall Street Journal compared the
suppression of free speech at Missouri, Dartmouth, and Yale to the terrorist
attacks in Paris as an example of the inadequacy of modern institutions to deal
with reality due to a profound lack of common moral values:
“Missouri and Paris have
something important in common. Both
represent the inability of primary social institutions to defend
themselves. American institutions of
higher learning are beset by an intellectual anarchy that is eroding their
reason for being. . . .
“Institutions survive for many
reasons, but one is that they operate inside a common moral order. . . . [Now
free speech has declined] as a common value on American campuses. . . .
students organize themselves into mini-mobs . . . to silence anyone on campus
who they imagine disagrees with them.”
(Daniel Henninger, “From Missouri to Paris,” The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, November 19, 2015, A13.)
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| The Reformation: A Confederacy of Pedants. |
In any event, the rejection of Aristotelian-Thomism laid the
groundwork for its replacement with the bewildering array of theories and
philosophies that followed hard on the heels of the Reformation. This caused Chesterton to comment that
“[s]ince the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of
philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if
left to themselves, common men would call common sense.” (Chesterton, The “Dumb Ox”, op. cit., 145.)
As we might expect, the emphasis on new theories and
philosophies led to an overreaction. As
Knox observed,
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| "Enthusiasm had but to lift its voice. . . ." |
“[T]he leaders of the Reformation had the defects of
their qualities; they were scholars, not seldom pedants; they had divided
Europe into a patchwork of sects, and deafened the public with their
theologizing. The reform of manners, by
common consent, was still an unrealized ambition; there was too much of head,
too little of heart, in the religiosity of the period. Protestantism had created a demand for
simplicity, but done little to satisfy it.
Enthusiasm had but to lift its voice, and it was certain of a hearing.”
(Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 5.)
Given, then, that people were faced with the choice of boring
old orthodoxy or tedious new innovations, the temptation to which many gave in
was to chuck the whole presumably discredited reliance on the intellect and go
over to the will. From there, as we have
seen, it was a short leap to an entirely new concept of religion itself . . .
which would have shocked the reformers even more than it did the orthodox when
it reached full bloom in the modernist movement of the late nineteenth century
within Christianity, and the New Age movement outside of it.
The intellect and reason were discredited, and thinking
became anathema. Religion, which should
consist of human beings’ particular service to God, now became God’s general service
to humanity.